The realm for a universal forum that discovers, explores, and prepares the way for eventual large-scale cyborg sociocultural integration, which just a few years ago would have been incredulous, is now upon us as partly evidenced through the proximity at which science, technology and the Internet are rapidly arriving at expectant machine sentience. This publication will address critical, foundational elements of study in human-machines and cyborgs, including their creation, governance, policy, and sustainment; rights, privileges, and expectations for participation in digital society; and other imperative aspects of their impending peaceful existence alongside their biological human, plant, and animal inhabitants in this world.

Emerging Human-Machine Technologies will publish high-quality, anonymously peer-reviewed essays that explore universal concerns, ethics, objectives, and principles in aspects of human enhancement technologies related to human-machines, machine-humans, their cyber-relatives, and proliferation of cyborg activity, culture, engineering, society, and technology. This volume will include groundbreaking and exploratory author contributions from engineers, practitioners, researchers, scholars, scientists, theorists, political scientists, lawyers, philosophers, ethicists, and human factors technologists who work closely theoretically or in practice with select human enhancement technologies, synthetic biological sciences, military advancements, robotics engineering, nanoscience technologies, and related allied research interests. The book will provide a forum for cybernetics issues in the humanities in emerging technologies, including research into design, engineering, and technological aspects of human-machine creation and existence for potential acceptance, ethics, participation, policy, governance, and socialization between individuals and corporate, global, networked, human-machine experience.

Ashgate Publishing has already expressed interest in this volume for its Emerging Technologies, Ethics and International Affairs series with selected abstracts to be duly considered by the publisher.

Warm wishes for a very healthy, happy, safe and productive new year to everyone in the ISPR/Presence community – I’m looking forward with you to lots of exciting and thought-provoking (tele)presence developments in 2015!

Get ready to take the stage with Paul McCartney. If that’s not your thing, you can test-drive the latest SUV before it’s available in showrooms or experience a movie as though you’re in the scene. That’s been the promise of virtual reality (VR) for years, although stepping into an immersive three-dimensional virtual world has always required expensive stereoscopic head-mounted displays and other specialized equipment.

A new, more accessible form of virtual reality delivered via the Web promises to let people experience digital worlds in 3-D using head-mounted displays connected to a variety of browser-enabled devices. Web VR is expected to offer the ability to move you from one immersive experience to another with a click of the mouse, touch of the screen or nod of the head. Web VR will let software developers port their virtual worlds to the Web, making them available for most VR hardware.

The CONTEXT conferences are the world’s prime forum for presentation and exchange of insights and cutting-edge results from the wide range of disciplines concerned with context.

The main theme of CONTEXT 2015 is “Back to the roots”, focusing on the importance of interdisciplinary cooperations and studies of the phenomenon. Context, context modeling and context comprehension are central topics in linguistics, philosophy, sociology, artificial intelligence, computer science, art, law, organizational sciences, cognitive science, psychology, etc. and are also essential for the effectiveness of modern, complex and distributed software systems.

CONTEXT 2015 invites high-quality contributions from researchers and practitioners in foundational studies, applications and evaluations of modeling and use of context in all relevant fields. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the role of context seen from different perspectives in:

The death of distance. That was the great promise of the internet in its early days: by making cheap, immediate communication possible around the world, it would eliminate geographical constraints on relationships, media and commerce.

Twenty-odd years later, much of that promise has come to pass: all manner of work is now done remotely. Call a helpline and your query might be answered by someone halfway round the world; buy a book and it might be delivered from a warehouse on another continent. But pockets of labour have remained the preserve of humans – mostly those that involve the “last mile”, where, say, parcels must be delivered or premises cleaned.

Perhaps not for much longer. Faced with the difficulty of developing genuinely smart robots, people are exploring the idea of having humans guide relatively dumb machines. Trials are under way with cleaning robots, but it is not hard to see how the same technology could be used to outsource all sorts of jobs, from receptionists to care workers.

We would like to cordially invite you to consider contributing a paper to AIMA – held as a part of the Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems (FedCSIS 2015).

FedCSIS a yearly international multi-conference organized by the Polish Information Processing Society (PTI) in cooperation with the IEEE Region 8, ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing, European Alliance for Innovation, Lodz ACM Chapter, Polish Operational and Systems Research Society – POSRS, Eastern Cluster ICT Poland, Mazovia Cluster ICT (further technical collaborations will be announced shortly).

The workshop on Artificial Intelligence in Medical Applications – AIMA 2015 – provides an interdisciplinary forum for researchers and developers to present and discuss latest advances in research work as well as prototyped or fielded systems of applications of Artificial Intelligence in the wide and heterogenious field of medicine, health care and surgery. The workshop covers the whole range of theoretical and practical aspects, technologies and systems based on Artificial Intelligence in the medical domain and aims to bring together specialists for exchanging ideas and promote fruitful discussions. Read more on Call: 5th International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in Medical Applications (AIMA’15)…

[Image: Visitors to the Space Needle in Seattle walk past a circle on the floor that produces an animated image of the Space Needle when viewed with the new Space Needle app, at left. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)]

High-tech additions to Space Needle make for enhanced experience

Donna Gordon Blankinship
Dec 27, 2014

SEATTLE — Visitors to Seattle’s Space Needle are treated to a gorgeous view of this waterfront city when skies are clear and the sun is shining.

But on a recent beautiful day, many in the crowd on the observation level of the Space Needle — one of Seattle’s most popular tourist attractions — ignored the view over Elliott Bay.

Instead, they were mesmerized by virtual depictions of views and peeks into other Seattle tourist attractions that appeared on walls, screens and videos. The new high-tech experience at the Space Needle includes a virtual reality video that seems to take visitors all over Seattle to check out other tourist sites, while they ignore the real view that brought them there.

The antidote to racism partly lies in empathy, or the willingness to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes,” as the saying goes. But scientists from universities across Europe are taking the maxim one step further, providing people an opportunity to experience life in someone else’s skin by experimenting with virtual reality as a means of helping people shed racial stereotypes.

ISWC invites submissions on everything related to computing on the body: on-body sensing and sensor networks; wearables for professional use, mobile healthcare, or entertainment; wearability and interaction; and “on-the-go” uses of mobile devices and systems. Submissions can be a Full Paper (of maximum 8 pages), a Note (4 pages), or a Brief (2 pages), and are due early April, 2015. Read more on Call: ISWC 2015 – 19th annual International Symposium on Wearable Computers…

Photographer Erik Johansson introduces himself on his web site with this: “I’m a photographer and retoucher from Sweden. I use photography as a way of collecting material to realize the ideas in my mind.” A larger version of this piece, titled “The Cover up,” is available here, and much more mind-bending presence-related work (including video material) is available on his site.